by Grania
Jesus & Mo is being an equal opportunities blasphemer this week. The worshipers of Thor and Atum must be most insulted by this heresy.
Thor, being a god whose fame has endured into relatively recent times (and not just because of the dude in the comics) is still honored by having a day of the week named after him, had a wife, a lover or two and at least three children and saved the world at Ragnarök where he died, the world was covered by water and two humans Líf and Lífþrasir repopulate the world.
Atum predates Jesus & Mo by quite a bit, as he is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts dating back as far as 2400 BC. He created himself, lifted souls to heaven and was said to be the finisher of the world, when he would return the world to the watery abyss. Wikipedia says this about him:
Atum was a self-created deity, the first being to emerge from the darkness and endless watery abyss that existed before creation. A product of the energy and matter contained in this chaos, he created his children—the first deities, out of loneliness. He produced from his own sneeze, or in some accounts, semen, Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture. The brother and sister, curious about the primeval waters that surrounded them, went to explore the waters and disappeared into the darkness. Unable to bear his loss, Atum sent a fiery messenger, the Eye of Ra, to find his children. The tears of joy he shed on their return were the first human beings.
The gods don’t mind a bit of plagiarism, it seems.
“The Jatravartid People of Viltvodle Six firmly believe that the entire universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called The Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming Of The Great White Handkerchief.”
http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/greatgreenarkleseizure.html
Bless you.
Clearly Atum copied Douglas Adams, just 4500 years before he existed. As nothing is impossible for the gods, this is entirely plausible.
~Grania
There is an alternate explanation that might also explain how the Jewish Bible was able to prophesy the events in the gospels.
They used the Tardis?
~Grania
I’m waiting for him to pick on the FSM (pasta be upon him) 😉
Shouldn’t that be “sauce be upon him?”
How about sauce and pasta be upon him…as close to his mouth as possible. lol
Or Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of sexual misconduct, who inspired sin just to punish it with STD, which could be cured again by begging her forgiveness?
He had a distant follower in Europe at one point. I remember hearing about a medevial priest who went around ensuring that people, particularly young women, had lots of good sins to confess – to him, of course.
Many in Medieval Europe believed that syphilis could be cured by having sex with someone who didn’t have it – by passing it on to them you cured yourself.
They also believed red hair was caused by the sin of sex with a menstruating woman.
And leprosy was a punishment for debauchery. Crusaders with leprosy shut themselves in hospices for the rest of their lives and did not go back to their families so as not to shame them.
The practice of getting cured by having sex with someone who doesn’t have a disease has not died out. It is alive and well in Africa where if you have AIDS, have sex with a virgin girl. WIKI
With Yahweh you’ll end up with monogenism, with Atum you’ll end up with polygenism. Atum is more plausible than Yahweh.
As long as they fall into the tax deductible region, there is nothing to prevent these old time religions making a comeback.
God doesn’t condemn people: they condemn themselves.
And what a weasely pointless little excuse that is, isn’t it? Blechhhh.
Even if we were to grant it (and that is a mighty big IF,) as Jesus & Mo points out that still doesn’t absolve God from creating the Bad-Guys-Who-Totally-Deserve-What- They-Get in the first place. The “self-condemning” and their suffering are presumably considered a fair exchange — a necessary byproduct — for the all-important creation of the saved who will love God as He loves them.
This level of self-absorbed narcissism on God’s part transfers to the believers. There HAD to be a Hitler in order for there to be a THEM, see? The idea that even Hitler and his “free” choices can only be understood as complex products of genetics, upbringing, time, and place — and no, it’s NOT “totally okay” under any circumstances that his eternal agony stands in as collateral damage for sparkles put on the ‘Me-And-My-God Show’ — puzzles the hell out of them (or ought to.)
When the Omnipotent Omniscient Creator of the Universe runs into the all too human storyline of the father-like Biblical God and his anger, jealousy, surprise, and disappointment with his ‘children,’ the ensuing hijinks always remind me of the Keystone Cops — banging into each other and then trying to go in two directions at once in order to assert their authority and keep the peace and harmony they’re in the very process of destroying.
God in many (if not all) parts of the Bible seems to view his children as extensions of his own ego. Their misdeeds are bad because they are an embarrassment to him.
Which makes perfect sense in an honor culture.
Even Christianity is steeped in its assumptions — which makes it amusing when modern Christians who clearly reject all the dangerous and antiquated assumptions of honor culture mentality in their own lives still try to shove some sort of enlightened wisdom into the Bible and its “message.”
One of my favorites was Ymir from Norse mythology. Other entities sprang into existence out of the sweat from his armpits. Odin and his brothers then killed him and used his body parts to make the world. They used his flesh to make the earth, his hair to make trees, his teeth for boulders, his bones for hills from which sprang dwarves that helped hold up the sky, which they had crafted from his skull. They threw his brains up into the air to create clouds and, finally, they used his eyebrows to make a great wall around Midgard.
That is about 8 times cooler than the Christian creation myth.
Let’s not forget Odin, as honored in Wotanstag (Wednesday in German), Mars (Mardi in French) Freya’s day, or Saturn’s day.
I thought Wednesday in German is ‘Mittwoch’, because the christian week begins with Sunday. That also explains why Sabbath is on Saturday. Historically, Saturday was the last day of the week. In some shops you can still buy calendars that start on sunday instead of monday.
In Cloggieland we did keep our pagan Wednesday (Woensdag = Wodan’s dag).
Hmmm…I guess I really old….
You’re right, there is no “Wotanstag” in Germany. Maybe DrBrydon confused it with “Donnerstag” for Donar (Thor)?
From a Wikipedia entry on Odin: “The weekday name Wednesday derives from the Old English name of the god: ‘Woden’s day’. Cognate terms are found in other Germanic languages, such as Old High German wōdnesdæg, Middle Low German wōdensdach (Dutch Woensdag), and Old Norse Óðinsdagr (Danish Onsdag). All of these terms derive from Proto-Germanic *Wodensdag, itself Germanic interpretation of Latin Dies Mercurii (“Day of Mercury”). While other day names containing Germanic theonyms remained into Old High German, the name derived from Odin’s was replaced by a translation of Church Latin media hebdomas ‘middle of the week’ (modern German Mittwoch).[4]”
Is the Peter Paul and Mary song “If I Had a Hammer” inspired by Thor? 🙂
Clever of Atum to think of semen when he had nobody to use it with. I can’t wrap my head around how that whole thing is “intelligently designed”.
Ancient Egyptian mythology has more than one story involving semen–take a look at the “Horus and Seth” section on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Egypt
sounds like gods are a lot like bands: too many to count and only a few ever make it up that ladder.
now, which of the successful gods is most like taylor swift?
Edward Fitzgerald says the same thing beautifully in his critique of Islam, cleverly disquised as a “translation” of Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat.” Starting from quatrain LXXVIII:
“What! out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the yoke
Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain
Of Everlasting Penalties, if broke!
“What! from his helpless Creature be repaid
Pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allay’d-
Sue for a Debt he never did contract,
And cannot answer–Oh, the sorry trade!
“Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!”
The next few verses have a similar theme.
And those who husbanded the golden grain
And those who flung it to the winds like rain
Alike to no such aureate earth are turn’d
As, buried once, men want dug up again.
Cynical bastard, wasn’t he?
(Btw, which version of the Rubaiyat were you quoting, Helian? I’m not familiar with those stanzas)
cr
Something similar to those stanzas is in most of the Fitzgerald versions. English translations of some of Omar’s actual poetry are available, and are interesting in their own right.
Yes, I know. Fitzgerald kept re-working it (5 versions I think?). I just meant those spceific ones you quoted, I don’t recall those exact words.
cr